Throughout the history of the Post Office, there has been a gradual development whereby the Post Office encourages mailers to prepare their mail in such a way as to reduce the effort required on the part of the Post Office for processing such mail. As an inducement to the mailer to prepare the mail in such a manner so as to bring about faster mail delivery, the Post Office offers mailers a discount on such items as pre-sorted mail, printing of zip codes and pre-printed bar codes to augment automatic processing with machines such as optical character recognition (OCR) sorters and bar code readers and sorters.
Even with the present reduced postage rates for pre-sorted zip code mail and the like, the Post Office is experiencing difficulties in processing the mail not only because of the ever increasing volume of mail that is required to be delivered, but also because a significant amount of mail presented to the Post Office is not in compliance with postal regulations regarding acceptability for automatic processing. Checking compliance of the mail and accuracy of postage paid for the bulk mail had to be done manually. To overcome these problems, the Post Office has gone to large mailers and industries involved in the manufacture of equipment for the processing of mail for the purpose of creating schemes whereby the Post Office and mailer could work closely together to reduce the burden upon the Post Office as a result of such increasing volumes of mail, to reduce non-compliant mail that is presented to the Post Office and to eliminate manual acceptance procedures now required by the Post Office.